He said: With Oxytocin in the body, it makes me do things selflessly. It is the generosity chemical. Generosity is doing things for people with no want of return. It’s a transaction if I do something for you and you expect something back. In the Liberty Mutual ad you see the selfless giving.

One of Simon’s recent Tweets:A team is not a group of people that work together. A team is a group of people that trust each other. Stan Westreich, a dear friend, shared a story that reflects what it means to trust. In doing a deal with someone that was concerned with all the small type of a contract Stan heard his father say: I know a thousand ways to break a contract, but I do not know how to break a handshake. Do you want to shake on the deal?

Dan Ariely touched on this in his book Predictably Irrational. Ariely’s Chapter 4:The Cost of Social Norms speaks to these differences that Sinek touches on. These relationships are based on Trust and Relationship. The market norm is based on a financial transaction. If you turn a social norm into a financial transaction, the social norm based on trust and relationship goes away. Seldom if ever can it be regained.

In the book Message to Garcia, Rowan did the thing asked of him. He carried a message to Garcia. We need people, Hubbard says, who will be loyal to a trust. Take the message, do what needs to be done, never even asking “How?”

You need people you can trust in that way. Every leader knows that trust is indispensable to any multi-person task or endeavor. But in our “modern” organizations, we spend more time explaining why something wasn’t accomplished than would have been required to do it in the first place.

Trust is not primarily a psychological thing. It is not about feelings. Trust was the operational imperative in hunting bands long before there was any “psychology.” It is the glue that provides the necessary interdependence required for survival or success. But it depends implicitly upon competence.

And then it depends upon conscience. People who don’t have the necessary level of both are not to be trusted. On your flight from A to B, you have to trust your flight crew to have both.

…Publius Syrus, the Greek leader and philosopher who lived and wrote in the 1st-century B.C., had this to say: “It is better to trust virtue [meaning extreme competence] than fortune.”

Translation: Put your trust in competence, not in the hope that trusting others will enhance their competence. And it is even better to trust conscience than competence. A highly conscientious person will develop or find the competence needed to carry out any task to fruition.

Leadership virtuosos trust conscience and the capacity to learn how above all else.

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About Me

My name is Ozzie Gontang. I am married. Kip’s an Aussie but Ozzie’s not. We have two daughters, Erin and Allison. They have indelibly imprinted on the back of their eyelids: If you want to know the future, create it. And they have and are. Both went to Berkeley in Cellular & Molecular Biology. Erin’s […]